Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Invested in Bitcoin “Just for Fun”

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak personally bought into Bitcoin at $700 to see what could be done with it. With the price now hovering around $3000 he says he’s way up on his investment.

Personal Exploratory Investment

Steve Wozniak, who left Apple in 1985 but remains very much invested in technology, revealed he bought BTC during an interview with CNBC on Monday:

I remember getting interested in bitcoin some time ago. It was $70 for a bitcoin, man and I went online and you had to have a special bank account at a special bank and I couldn’t buy any bitcoin so I gave up. Eventually, I got some of them at the $700 stage and it went down to $350. I didn’t invest, I did it so I could play with bitcoin.

He went on to say that he was interested in the experience of using the coin in a real world environment such as what it was like to shop with it at places such as restaurants and hotels.

“It’s not that easy to do yet, but it’s getting there. I was just playing around trying out how to buy and sell stuff and I didn’t care I lost a ton of money, but now I’m way up,” Wozniak added.

In 2014 he tweeted this video of the tested.com team’s experiences with a Bitcoin ATM.

Bitcoin, A Secure Technology

When he was asked what he thought to blockchain technology and why he thinks it is important, he said that he likes the technology, admiring how every single transaction is noted and saved. He went on to speculate:

(Bitcoin has) A lot of good security and traceability and looking-back aspects to it … That’s probably why a lot of banks are interested in it.

Wozniak, an advocate of cyber security, spoke at the Business Rock Technology Summit in Manchester, England where he criticized US authorities over their legal pleas for access to Apple customers data:

There are politicians who do not have a clue as to what cyber security is all about trying to pass laws saying that Apple has to make a product less secure. Why? That’s a crime. That is just so horrible. I just cry! Why would Apple do it for such a weak case where the government were not going to get any valuable information at all – it’s impossible.